


Red Team Orange Dragon Blues

by CornetHummy



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Death, Animal Transformation, Anxiety, Depression, Dragons, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Season/Series 15, eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-03-26 14:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19007350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CornetHummy/pseuds/CornetHummy
Summary: After quitting Red Team, Grif faces isolation on Iris. He'll cope with guilt, confusion, loneliness, a lot of muddled feelings, and a mysterious force that has inexplicably transformed him into a dragon.





	1. Prologue

Grif was supposed to feel fantastic. Spilling your guts after holding everything in for so long was meant to be cleansing, right? He’d stood his ground and they’d left. Sarge had never sounded weaker than when he’d called for Grif to follow; not even that time Sarge figured out the ‘war’ was fake compared. Donut hadn’t been able to smooth everything over. Simmons hadn’t said a damn thing, which probably made it easier. 

He’d told himself it wasn’t going to be like the hologram room. He wouldn’t shrink down like Epsilon did, pleading with the others and going back on his awful words. That just made it worse. He wasn’t going to stand his ground and expect everyone to just forgive him right away. (Not that there was anything to forgive!) He would stand by whatever came out, even if he regretted some of it. Even if he could have worded it differently. 

It was over. They were off on another bullshit adventure, and Grif had gotten out of it. No one would shoot at him, call him names, boss him around or make him do any work. No one would tell him anything as long as he was here. It was everything he wanted. 

So why didn’t he feel fantastic? Why was he so tired and drained, slumping back to the base as the sky went from burnt orange to the grey-violet of dusk? Jesus, telling it like it is turned out to be a fucking downer. He kept hearing his own words in his head, in his own voice, saying things that...no, he meant them, just maybe not like that. 

But they wouldn’t listen to “I’m tired and I want to rest,” would they? Or “I don’t want to upend our entire lives for Church again after we’d finally come to terms with what happened to him.” Or just “there are other people in the galaxy who can put their necks on the line, just this once can’t we let them?” He wasn’t a Freelancer like Carolina and Wash, not a sword-wielding badass like Tucker, and he definitely didn’t want to end up like Sarge who couldn’t function if he wasn’t against some Blues or Whites or something else. So he vented his spleen and a lot more came out instead.

Sighing, he collapsed on one of the ragged chairs inside the base after halfheartedly flicking the lights on, a warm beer in his hand. Technically it wasn’t ‘beer’ so much as ‘something he and Carolina had tried to make when their alcohol supplies went out because homebrewing couldn’t be that hard.’’ While this batch didn’t trigger conversations with mountains and potential blindness, it tasted a little like wheatgrass juice and was just as likely to give you a good buzz. But their supplies of the former batch were long gone and Grif thought he ought to have a beer in celebration, or something. It was the spirit of the thing.

Ten minutes passed, then 20, then half an hour where he considered drinking it. With a sigh he stepped outside to dump it out. “Base is too quiet,” he said aloud because he needed to hear the sound of a voice. “Messing with my head. Wish we got good TV out here.” Nevermind, he’d get used to it. In the meantime he needed a new way to cheer himself up. Celebrate! To celebrate.

Moments later he marched out into the valley with his sleeping bag and a box of gluey bar rations salvaged from the closets. He’d clear his mind camping out under the stars. Grif prided himself in his ability to sleep anywhere and anytime, so it certainly wasn’t that he couldn’t spend the night in an empty base. It had nothing to do with any of that. He just wanted to get some fresh air and make ration bar s’mores, which consisted of a ration bar melted over a campfire and sandwiched between two other ration bars. It had been Donut’s invention. 

Oh hell, he wasn’t hungry enough to justify getting a fire going. Or he was just too tired, weighed down by a dragging, lingering exhaustion beyond his usual nap readiness. Lighting a fire felt like work anyway. So did unwrapping a ration bar or opening a bedroll. In the end he just used it as a pillow, slumping onto the cold, hard ground. 

Funny, the ground didn’t feel that cold. Kind of warm, honestly. It was pleasant. He hoped it didn’t mean there was some kind of impending volcanic eruption. Would be his luck to finally get some time to himself just in time for that. Well, if he started feeling earthquakes he could get aboard...oh, no ships. Right. Just him. 

Whatever. 

Dexter Grif considered himself an all time expert napper, one who could and literally did sleep through a major battle at least once. It should not have taken him as long to fall asleep as it did that night. He blamed the stars, all bright and distracting. 

By the time he’d finally managed slumber, he’d found and decided on three whole constellations. He was out before the concentric red circles started appearing in the grass around him, one around the other around the other, with him in the center. 


	2. Dragons Are Mysterious

Grif felt like his limbs were made of lead and his head full of cotton.

Was he hung over? No, he hadn’t had anything significant to drink. He’d remember starting. Grif had a relationship with his body best described as “contentious,” but he didn’t experience hangovers without getting drunk. 

Also, where the hell was his bedroll? Why was his head resting on the ground, and why was the ground so hard? He’d fallen asleep in his armor, sure, but that was nothing special. He did it all the time. It was comfy. 

He opened one eye, found it turned against a sun already high in the sky and shut it quickly with a groan, covering his face with one hand. At least, he made the motions that would lead to hand on face. Instead he got something leathery and warm. Opening his eyes revealed a curtain of skin with bones between them, like the wings of…

“AAAH! BAT! GIANT BAT GIANT BAT GIANT DAY BAT!” He stumbled to his feet, all grogginess gone as panic-fueled adrenaline filled his veins, and reached for the gun he’d forgotten to bring with him. The Giant Day Bat’s wings flickered right next to him, stretching out longer than the length of his body. That would explain why he felt so heavy. It was perched right on his back!

“Get OFF, fucker!” He spun around, only to stumble and trip as his legs got caught in something. He landed on his stomach and grunted, the huge wings splaying out on either side of him. 

Then he noticed that the wings moved when he moved his arms, arms which were conspicuously absent. The thing he’d tripped on was a tail, and furthermore, it hurt. Meaning it was his tail. And those big, thick, scaly legs with their long talons he saw upon standing were his legs. And that pale, scaled stomach was his too, moving in and out as he breathed. 

“What the hell!” He spread one of the wings, spotting a dewclaw at the top and several claws at the tips. They felt like fingers and yet not. He paced in a circle, finding that these feet supported his weight just fine but weren’t exactly the most graceful things. He was a very large, scaly duck. No, wait, not a duck. But the movements felt right.

“What the hell,” he repeated with a huff, folding his wings so the dewclaw tips rested on the ground. His body, or this body, was covered in golden orange scales with black stripes, save for the ribbed yellow scales of his stomach and underside. He found he could move his tail as easily as if it were another limb, which he supposed it was, and curled it around himself to see it ended in a crest of black horns. 

“Tail. Why tail. Why wings and scales. Why.” He crouched down with a vague sense that putting his stomach to the grass would be safer, only to notice something scratching against his chest. It glinted orange against the dirt, a misshapen piece of metal with a very familiar color. There were other pieces of its like scattered around the clearing.

Picking it up with his dewclaws proved too difficult to bother with, so he just kicked it over to a rock with his big, clumsy feet to get a better look at it. He had a sinking feeling he knew what it was, but he needed confirmation and a distraction from whatever was happening. Thus he spent the next few moments digging, scratching, and (for lack of a better term) nosing bits and pieces of orange metal into a pile together, trying not to think about how easily his neck bent down to the ground now.

Ah, yes, there it was. It was an orange helmet, squished flat but still recognizable. It was the size of one of his toe claws. The entire pile of armor scraps was only a little bigger than the decidedly serpentine shadow cast by his head.

Okay. So he was. Big.  He was currently very big and not at all humanoid. “Shut up, Sarge,” he muttered to the fat jokes he already imagined in his head. 

Why’d he kept his armor on anyway, if he was done being a soldier? He didn’t need protection from anything on Iris. Except, apparently, sudden physical transformations, and it sure didn’t protect from that. Still, he found himself digging up a little hole with his back claws and shoving the armor in with his nose before patting dirt over the hole with a sweep of his tail. It made a little mound so he could find it later. He just felt like he ought to do that. He needed to account for that suit, no matter what condition it was in or whether or not he could use it.

“Did I get into the old batch Carolina made after all? I thought we finished it off after Tucker thought he was on a date with the lady on the raisins box.” Last night, Grif talked aloud to hear a voice. Now he was doing it to make sure he still could. Humans spoke, his voice was human, wasn’t it? Maybe a little gruffer-sounding, but human.

He had to know what he looked like. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but he had to know. 

“Well, I was thinking, what am I gonna do now that I actually have free time? And apparently the answer to that is turn into a monster or something, which is really not what I had in mind, universe? If we’re being honest? I was gonna spend today napping and maybe finding out if the slurpee machine at the ruins of the waterpark still works. Or just taking a nice relaxing walk in the meadows. Or climbing a mountain. Or thinking about climbing a mountain and then not doing it but being glad I thought of it.” As he walked, he brushed right through the low-hanging branches of some of the trees and broke some into twigs without thinking about it. Stupid trees. “But apparently I am spending Day One of Dexter Grif’s New Life like this, for some goddamn reason. Glad you have my back, universe. Glad you’re not done with me, because here I am not done with incredible bullshit even though I…”

He trailed off as he approached the edge of one of Iris’s huge, peaceful lakes, the one where they’d built the waterpark. He and Caboose had gone fishing there once. They hadn’t caught anything, but colony-born Caboose just seemed happy to be out in nature and Grif got to relax in a boat. At least until the boat sank. Still, it was nice. 

He was not here to fish, even if he was a little hungry. (He was more than a little hungry, but not inclined to dig through pond scum for breakfast.) He approached very slowly, the shadows of little creatures beneath the surface darting away as he cast his much larger shadow. So there were fish in the lake after all, elusive little fuckers.

Two large, round, red eyes blinked back at him, set in a viper-like head with a ridge of black spines on the sides of the nose and two curved ram horns on the edges. As he expected, his wings served as front limbs. There was a dark red patch over one eye, in the same shape as the scars he bore from his organ-exchange with Simmons. 

If this was a hallucination, it was a very detail-oriented one. He was kind of impressed.

The red eyes (which he had trouble calling ‘his eyes’) blinked again, this time with a second pair of sideways, translucent eyelids. He could see right through them. “Ew! Ew, oh gross, that’s fucking gross,” he muttered as he retreated, slumping on the lakeside and covering his head with his wings. 

“Why am I a fucking dragon?!”

Wyvern. Technically he was a wyvern, what with the wings-as-arms and all. 

“Shut up, Simmons,” he mumbled. 


	3. Dragons are Majestic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grif noises.

Grif couldn’t bring himself to approach the lakeside again. He didn’t want to look at himself, neither his reflection nor his shadow on the ground. It wasn’t that it was ugly or anything. Honestly, the creature he saw looked cool, the sort of thing he might boggle at from a safe distance. Being that creature was the opposite of a safe distance.

He needed familiarity, familiarity and the stash of prepackaged snacks he remembered hiding under his bed for an emergency. He always kept food around here and there, an old habit from days where he wasn’t sure when his mother would come home with money for food. This, he decided, counted as an emergency. 

Besides, the base was his home now, wasn’t it? The big, empty base he’d built with the others. He ought to claim it, figure out what to do with the spare rooms. It’d be a good distraction from All This, or snap him out of whatever hallucination he was still experiencing.

“Nnnnnggghhh.” Walking was still awkward, best done by using his big wing-hands as braces to pull himself forward while keeping his weight on his back legs. The bones visible between the membrane wings looked so fragile he was afraid of breaking his own fingers if he wasn’t careful. Why couldn’t he find a dragon-shaped suit of armor? There wasn’t much he liked about the military, but without the armor he felt so vulnerable and visible. Naked.

“Yes, Donut, I know I’m naked,” he muttered. “Wait, why the hell am I talking to them like this? They’re not around and I’m still...ugh. Stupid! Pterodactyl! Wings! Stupid! Tail! Uggghh.”

Not that the tail was a problem, exactly. He was pretty sure it was helping him balance, though he imagined holding it aloft as he did made him look like the world’s biggest, scaliest kitten. It’s just that it was there. He could distinctly remember an entire life in which it was not there, and now it was, another limb that felt like it was supposed to be there. At least when he was given Simmons’s hand, it was still a hand. He had plenty of practice owning and operating a hand. This was new, and distracting. He could lash and wave it back and forth and feel the grass through it when he let it droop, which was one reason why he insisted on holding it up. Soreness was better than inexplicable sensation.

He continued to nggghhh, mrrrrh, nyrrrmmmmm and uggghhhnmmm his way back to the base complex. Couldn’t a dragon move any faster? He was running out of ways to whine. He thought of those bipedal dinosaurs that dashed around like roadrunners, but refused to try that. That was  _ running _ . No more running for Dexter Grif.

“Oh thank god, why the hell is this base so far away, whose idea was it to...SON OF A BITCH.” Grif slumped his head in front of the door which was obviously too small for him now. “I’m a fucking idiot, of course it’s too small now. Stupid tiny-ass base. We shoulda built it bigger.” He thought for a second. “Actually, that would’ve been way more work. But still!” He scratched at the door with one of his wing-claws to no effect. There was no way they could do anything as advanced as open a door.

More out of frustration than innovation, he shoved his nose at the door. It fell right off its hinges as the doorway crumpled, then the front wall crumbled around his head. 

“Oh fuck.” 

He pulled his head out and looked over the base. Was it really that fragile? Sure, they’d had to build it with found materials, and had to talk Sarge out of including asbestos, and were distracted by figuring out where the hell Sarge had found asbestos in the first place, and maybe Simmons was not the expert on architecture he claimed to be, and they’d used up most of the cement on the waterpark, and what the hell were those things crawling out of the rubble? 

“Ew!” Grif yelped as he pulled his wings upwards, standing on his back legs so the crablike creatures scuttling out didn’t run into them. One still bumped into his foot and rolled into a plated ball. Okay, he had to admit that was a little cute, like those roly poly bugs except it had to be the size of a small dog. 

And he’d never seen things like that on Iris before. Could they have moved into the base that quickly? It was empty for what, 12 hours? 

Stepping carefully so he didn’t squish the roly poly, he tried once more to stick his head into the hole in the base. He’d knocked one of the hanging lights down, so the room was dark, but he could still make out toppled furniture. There was Wash’s favorite chair. There was the corner Lopez liked to stand in so everyone would leave him alone. There was the robot’s leftover burnt ozone scent, lingering alongside Tucker’s cologne, the machine oil from Sarge’s ‘workshop’ and Simmons’s…

Well, he just smelled Simmons. He couldn’t explain it. It just smelled like Simmons. 

He pulled his head back out. Too many scents, overwhelming his apparently rather keen sense of smell. He didn’t even know reptiles had those, but dragons apparently did. Maybe he just wasn’t a reptile in the classic sense. That’s why he felt so strange in there. It was like walking into a candle shop full of memories. No, just a candle shop.

No sign of the roly poly bugs, at any rate. Maybe they’d just snuck into an empty building like raccoons looking for trash. Come to think of it, some of them had left trails of little bits of paper in their wake. Paper and plastic…

He had to put his head down as low as it could go, and even then he couldn’t read the wrapper. But he could smell it. 

“You sons of bitches! Do you know how hard it is to get strawberry hand pies out here?! We had to set up makeshift internet and THEN Simmons had to get in and hack some transmissions and we had to disguise ourselves to go pick it up and come up with an excuse about a research camp and...and…” And it had been a blast, despite the hassle, and he’d been so happy to get those strawberry pies that he’d saved a few to savor. 

He’d just wanted things to stay like that. Couldn’t they have stayed like that? It was a retirement full of doing things for fun, with no one turning out to be a traitor or dragging them into a hellbent quest for revenge. No one dying.

“I’m just crashing because I need food,” he muttered. “That’s all. Mood crash.” As he rested his head on the ground, another roly poly crawled out of the rubble. 

Before he could think about what he was doing, he snapped it up and ate it whole. It was crunchy, a little like shrimp with a hint of strawberry and cream cheese, not really the strangest thing he’d ever tasted if he was being honest. 

Wait.

“Oh fuck. I ate a giant space bug! Raw!” He recoiled, taking deep breaths. Okay, that was a little nauseating but it was fine. They ate his snack cakes and that taste had been pretty good, and with the shell the crunch factor was way better-- because it has a  _ shell  _ and was an a _ lien bug _ that he just ATE. Like some kind of. Lizard thing.

What was worse, he wanted another one.

“Fuck this.” He only thought he needed familiarity. Familiarity, it turned out, really did breed contempt. It wasn’t going to do him any good to sit in front of a base he was too big for, a base probably devoid of snack cakes or company, one that smelled like Simmons. Somehow. 

Besides, he was afraid of damaging it further. It just felt wrong. It was supposed to be his home. That was the plan, right? He was going to figure out what had happened, fix the problem and then go back to living there. Forever.

With a slow lurch, he turned around to head back to the lake, not sure where else to go. If he was going to eat something, fish sounded better than bugs. At least then he could pretend it was sashimi. He caught a glance of a few bamboo-like sapling trees he could swear weren’t there the other day, but maybe he just wasn’t paying attention.

* * *

 

The sun glittered on the surface of the lake, with fish darting around and making little ripples. At least it was peaceful. Grif could take a nap lakeside after finally getting enough to eat, calm his mind so he could tackle this problem. Plus, the water looked so cool and refreshing. 

He leaned down to drink some of it and felt it splash against his snout, a relief against the hot midday sun. Grif figured out Iris didn’t really experience hot summers, not the way Hawaii or even Blood Gulch did at any rate, but it was probably close to the height of its warmer season. That was hot enough to justify a dip in the water.

Again his body moved without him thinking too hard about it and he found himself slipping into the lake, diving underwater and coming up with a sizable fish in his mouth. It was still pretty small in comparison, like eating a single anchovy that wiggled as it went down, but it wasn’t a goddamn giant bug.

He glanced down at himself and saw that he was folding his wings behind him and paddling on the surface of the thankfully deep lake. “Huh, look at this! Like a swan. Graceful as fuck.” He held his neck aloft, feeling the urge to show off until he reminded himself no one was watching. So whatever kind of dragon he was, he was clumsy on the ground and smoother in the water. Maybe he was some kind of freaky, alien aquatic dinosaur, though that wouldn’t account for the wings. 

“Okay, just gotta get used to eating things fresh and raw like some kind of health hippie in the meantime, cuz otherwise I’m not gonna eat.” He whined once more in memory of the strawberry hand pies. Sure, they would have been very difficult to unwrap without hands and the whole box would probably amount to barely a mouthful at his size, but they beat pond scum-flavored lake fish! 

“Alright, Grif, let’s go over things.” He continued to swim in a broad circle over the big lake, which he’d hereby dubbed Lake Griffington. Fish darted here and there, most a little too quick and small for his dragon head to catch. “So I went out to sleep under the stars, and-get back here you little fucker! And then I just woke up like this. Didn’t do anything unusual other than uh, you know, the whole. Fight thing. Agh, fuck! Almost had that one! Maybe I can find the old slurpee machine we built for the water park and like, eat the machine or something.” 

Circle two commenced. “Okay, I can’t just think about how I’m gonna eat. I can hear Sarge now. ‘Dammit, Private Grii-uff, stop prioritizing yer stomach! Texas Texas Patton quote I’m old!’ Yeah, I bet he’d just love this. Complain that he wanted Donut to turn into a dragon instead.” He snorted. Was that steam coming out of his nose?

A second snort failed to repeat the event. He chalked it up to water stuck up his nose. Diving for fish was earning diminishing returns.

“So what causes most bullshit we have to deal with, historically speaking? It’s either Project Freelancer, Church, shitty politicians, or aliens. I feel like Wash or Carolina would have brought it up if Freelancer had some kind of secret dragon mutation program by now. That’s the sort of thing you talk about during Donut’s 3 AM Truth or Dare Storytime, you know? Or like, Never Have I Ever. I mean, I never asked ‘never have I ever seen someone turn into a dragon’ but still.” 

“So aliens gave Tucker an alien sword, got him pregnant with Junior, built those spires that caused the, uh,” Grif wasn’t sure dragons could blush, but he felt like he was doing it. To distract himself he snapped at another fish, just barely missing. “God dammit! So it’s probably aliens. Aliens that waited until everyone else was gone to fuck with me, personally, because why not? Why? The Hell? Not? WILL YOU FUCKERS STAY STILL!?” 

Fish scattered as he splashed his head abruptly in the water. The translucent eyelid’s purpose became clear as he could see surprisingly well underwater. Not a fish in sight, all of them apparently avoiding him. Which was probably smart, but annoying.

He came back up for air, snorting out a spray of water. “Ugh. Alright, so all I have to do is look for something glowing and weird-looking, which means it’s probably alien tech. Then I just, uh, do what? Get them to fix me. Fix myself. Yes! I can do this myself, assholes.” Who was he talking to? Whatever. “And you know what else? I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine like this, on my own, eating fish and crap from the lake, swimming around like a giant goddamn swan. No one else is here so it doesn’t matter if anyone ever recognizes me again...ever. You can’t fuck with me, whoever you are. You can’t! Fuck! With Dexter! Grif! Because I’ve seen everything…! Dammit, where the hell have all the fish gone…”

Maybe his shouting scared them off? Could fish even hear? He ducked back down under the water to check. Denying any fear of a future robbed of his humanity was just making him hungrier. There had to be something big enough to eat. There! That shape approaching looked pretty big.

It looked very big, in fact, and fast. And as it approached, he realized he might not be the only thing scaring the fish off.

He surfaced just in time to see a huge pair of jaws leap up and nearly snap off his tail. 

“AAAAH! JESUS CHRIST!” He flapped and took off swimming for the shore, batting at the thing behind him with his back claws. He’d made out a long snout covered with needle-like teeth and a dolphin-shaped body. It leaped up to snap at him again and he turned around to headbutt it. “LEAVE ME ALONE!” 

Were there always aquatic dinosaurs in this lake? He felt like he’d remember one moving in. He’d have to figure that out later when one was not trying to eat him. He was supposed to be a goddamn top predator, what kind of bullshit was this?

He panicked and flapped, flapped, flapped to get away. He didn’t know how to fight with this body yet. Jaws clamped down on the tip of his tail and he screamed in pain, yanking it away as he took off. Blood trickled from where the ichthyosaur had taken off a bit of skin and scales, though thankfully not much else. It snapped at the air as he soared upwards, out of its reach.

“HA! Serves you right, fucker! Enjoy freshwater goddamn fish and leave me alone! Ow ow ow…” Grif had a high pain tolerance after all he’d been through, but he wasn’t used to feeling pain in a limb he’d only acquired recently. At least he could still fly properly.

Wait. Fly? He was flying. He was up there in the air, wind rushing beneath his wings, soaring far above everything. He was actually flying of his own power. When did he learn to fly? He thought that was going to take months. 

Then again, this dragon body seemed to know more about being a dragon than he thought. 

“Shit. Holy shit, this is...this is kind of awesome?” It was like the rush he got from driving or racing, but stronger and more powerful. He might not be much of a runner, but he knew he was a hell of a driver or a pilot. And now he was piloting  _ himself _ . 

“Yeah, yeah, alright. I could get used to this! Everything else is bullshit but I could live with this!” He soared over the valley, circling in triumph. “Big old lizard swan, majestic as FUCK in the air. Da na na don’t stop me noooow, I’m having such a good time, I’m havin’ a ball, don’t stop me me noooow, nanana good time mm na HAVING A BALL…” 

His stomach growled and his tail stung. “Alright, fine, fine! Gotta eat something for real so I can rest.” He was still too hungry to sleep properly. And then he’d go back and show that dinosaur-fish what for, taking over Lake Griffington. He’d named that lake. It was his! He and Caboose went fishing there and those were his fish to eat when he wanted them. That dinosaur tried to eat Grif? He picked on the wrong guy! Grif just had to figure out how to fight properly as a dragon who couldn’t hold a gun or a Grifshot and then he’d turn things around. He’d  _ eat  _ that dinosaur someday. Grif went to four Vegas Quadrant Buffets in as many hours, that’d be nothing. Grif stayed on Isis, the valley was his, the lake was his, those fish were  _ his _ . This was his territory. 

Wait. Territory?

“What the fuck.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The strawberry pies Grif is talking about are the prepackaged hand pies you see in grocery and convenience stores.


	4. Dragons Are Hunters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyoooooom.

Flying. Flying would clear his head. So would some real food, come to think of it. One (crunchy, delicious, STOP IT) bug and a few fish weren’t nearly enough to sustain him. He was a lot larger, larger creatures needed more energy just to move around, and fish in general were a lot smaller now. That One Fucker excepted.

“So I don’t want to hear anything about thinking with my stomach.” Grif couldn’t hear his own voice very well over the air rushing over his body, but it felt good to talk. One of the benefits of being alone was winning every single imaginary argument. “I’m doing what I have to do to stay alive. That’s military, isn’t it? Sort of? That’s what we tell ourselves whenever we’re following orders that make no damn sense. Oh, we have to, because something something UNSC something survival something victory.” 

He swooped to his left and started flying over a hilly region to avoid storm clouds gathering over one of the valleys. While he was fairly confident in his ability to fly aircraft through thunderclouds, he wasn’t so sure his actual own unarmored self would do so well in lightning. 

“Ha! Come to think of it, now they can never drag me back into the military again.” They couldn’t even make him wear that armor again. Not that he wasn’t glad it was safe where he’d buried it. Just for old times’ sake. That was all. 

“Maybe I could eat a dinosaur,” Grif mused. The ichthyosaur’s needle-sharp teeth flashed in his mind and he shivered. “Uh, one of the big, slow, non-biting kinds. A cow but in dinosaur form. That sorta thing.” 

There weren’t many big creatures altogether on Iris, which was a major advantage when Grif and the others were small humans who could get used to dealing with space tyrannosaurs as only an occasional thing. But now Grif was himself a big creature who had to eat slightly smaller things or spend all his time desperate to fill up on teeny creatures. It would be like eating ten potato chips a day, and the potato chips were mobile and knew how to hide from you. Fuck, that sounded exhausting.

“I mean, not that I know how I want to spend my time otherwise. I was gonna, you know…” He dove and snapped at a bird that easily evaded him. “Son of a-whatever, barely a chicken nugget anyway. Maybe work on some painting. Learn how to paint. Compose music. Win a lot of arguments with imaginary versions of people I know. Be smug about it. Learn how to cook coconut curry since we have a lot of coconuts lying around. And now I can just figure out how to do all those things with wings instead of hands and a big long tail.” 

See? It was fine. The last thing he needed to do was to let himself feel more than a little crappy and annoyed with this situation, because anything stronger tended to lead to weird spirals into bad places. Recent experiences showed him that all too well. 

And if he was too angry or miserable or...not lonely, exactly, but dissatisfied? What was to stop him from just letting the dragon brain take over completely if being Grif hurt too much? Then there wouldn’t be any Grif at all. 

“Ugh, see? Already thinking too much. Existential horror bad. Existential horror pointless.” He shook his head and lowered his sights back to the ground rolling beneath his wings, the hills like wrinkles on a green carpet. Very green, come to think of it. This area was more heavily forested than the region near the base. And hold on, was that movement?

Stopping in midair required a lot of flapping. Flying in a wide circle above his target was a lot easier and made him less obvious. Ah, there they were. A herd of deer-like creatures with slick blue-green fur and six legs were grazing in a clearing. 

There was another alien Grif hadn’t seen before. Surely Caboose would have made friends with these things at some point? It seemed like a very Caboose thing to do. Then again, maybe he’d done it in secret, which also seemed like a Caboose thing to do. This was the guy who went and revived his friend in the form of an AI fragment. 

Caboose would probably think the dragon thing was cool. He was a loyal friend. He deserved better than running off to try to save Church again, when Church didn’t appreciate it and Grif wouldn’t even help… 

Deer! Deer, yes, deer good. Deer cute. Deer cute and completely unaware of their surroundings.

Something kicked in like a reflex.

Before Grif knew it, he was shooting downwards, the ground rushing up to him. He swung around to cut off the escape of one of the bigger, slower deer as the herd took off, reached out, and felt something big and crunchy go down his throat. 

There, that was more like it. If he had to eat fresh food like some kind of hippie, at least he found something reasonably filling. A few more of those and he’d be fine. A few more...deer?

As he sat on the grass, Grif let his brain catch up with the events of the past few seconds. 

“I ate a deer. I ate a whole-ass deer at once. A cute deer. Fuck, I just ate Space Bambi’s Mom!”

And the worst part was, Space Bambi’s Mom was  tasty .

* * *

 

Much as Grif hated to admit enjoying physical activity, hunting was  _ fun _ . 

He always thought of it as the sort of thing the Sarges of the world would do in fatigues, squatting in the mud in the middle of some godforsaken forest in the middle of the winter. As far as Grif was concerned there was no need for that sort of thing when frozen chicken strips existed. This didn’t feel like that. There was nothing Sargeian in the least about letting his new instincts take the reins, looping and swerving around, diving for the deer-like creatures that seemed to have populated the plains overnight. 

He felt a pang of guilt about how cute they were, but he needed to eat. He supposed he would have been reliant on hunting and fishing eventually no matter what. He hadn’t really planned that whole ‘long term food source’ thing in depth. Everything had happened a bit suddenly. At least space deer was delicious.

Not that he wouldn’t have killed for some feral chicken strips. There was one large, bipedal birdlike thing stalking about with a big horn on its head, but Grif didn’t chance it. He knew one thing about animals by heart: never fuck with a big flightless bird. 

“Damn, is this what the Freelancers used to feel like? I’m like fucking invincible or something. Flawless predator. Okay, uh, mostly,” he added as he flew over a patchy forest, recalling that most of the creatures he’d gone after had escaped. At least he’d managed to catch and eat enough. 

More than enough, maybe.

Enough that flying was starting to get a little difficult, if he was being honest. He could feel the primal call of the food coma, and even if he was a born expert flier he suspected he’d have some trouble if he fell asleep in midair. He yawned as he looked down at the bottom of a rocky gorge where little forms darted away, everything taking on a purple tinge as the sun set. “Yeah, that’s right, count yourselves lucky. Just gotta recharge, that’s all. Shouldn’t...shouldn’t fly on a full stomach. It’s like swimming.” 

He saw a ledge jutting from the mouth of a cave gouged into the side of one of the cliffs. It seemed a little too perfect and appropriate. More importantly, he didn’t have to fly as far. Gotta love that conservation of movement, especially after Grif had spent the day being a lot faster and more mobile than usual. He’d earned an easy landing.

He alighted on the ledge and then collapsed into a pile with a low groan, his wings splayed out around him. “Hoo, okay, okay. All this is. Starting to catch up to me. Weird alien dragon body. Not invincible after all.” 

He paused. Why was he expecting someone to comment on his fatigue with a snarky comment?    
“Yeah, well, I’m a million times taller than you now, Simmons. And I’m graceful as fuck.” Grif curled his wings around himself and sat up in a more dignified-looking position. He knew Simmons wasn’t there to see him. It was the principle of the thing.

What would Simmons have thought of this? He’d probably be a total insufferable nerd. There’d be Dungeons and Dragons references. And then Simmons would try to bring up that D&D game on indefinite hiatus and everyone would want to start playing again, because Simmons couldn’t suggest that everyone had incompatible schedules, and Grif still wouldn’t be able to play his character ‘It’s Just Dexter Grif Because Playing Pretend is For 3 Year Olds and Nerds’ because Simmons was no fun.

Yes, it was clearly for the best that Simmons would never see Grif like this. For that reason alone and no others. 

“I mean, never say never.” God, Grif was starting to talk to himself a lot. It was a good way not to lose his voice. “Maybe they show up tomorrow in their ship with those stupid reporters and there’s Church and he’s all smug like surprise I didn’t die fuckers! Time to be an arrogant douchebag and have everyone give a shit about me anyway!” He flicked his tail against the limestone and the wounded patch stung.

“Ow, ow ow ow. Ow.” He curled around to check on his tail. The wound had stopped bleeding. Instead it was an ugly pinkish patch against his orange and black scales. He licked it absentmindedly to try to keep it clean. 

“...Maybe I shouldn’t do that.” It felt a little like how he used to pick at scabs. Objectively he knew it wasn’t going to speed up healing, but he just had to do it. Well, he’d just stop by the base, pour the entire supply of disinfectant on it and…

The base. He was not at the base. He was very much nowhere near the base.

He was resting on a cliff dotted with holes and caves, some more than big enough to fit him, others that wouldn’t comfortably house a human. It was part of a long, rocky ridge stretching far into the distance, facing another cliff with stripes of limestone and some other, darker stone. Below him was nothing but thin forest, boulders and dry grass. This was…

“I’M IN A FUCKING  _ CANYON _ !?”

Why? Why was it always canyons? Why was life a series of canyons in the middle of nowhere? Yes, since Iris had mountain ranges it stood to reason it would have a canyon somewhere, but why did it have to be there for Grif to find? Stupid fucking canyon. Stupid canyon looking all empty and gloomy and pretty at night, and glowing. 

Glowing?

At first Grif wondered if his night vision was just that good, but no. He was a diurnal dragon, and there really were patches of glowing stuff along the walls, giant lichens and blue bioluminescent plants he hadn’t even noticed during the day. Big moths fluttered by, captivated by their light. The glowing lichen clung to the canyon and cave mouth itself. A moth landed on Grif’s nose, triggering a sneeze.

“Was this...was this always here? I mean, we weren’t the most observant, but we would have seen this. We wouldn’t have missed stuff like this.” He spoke softer now, out of reverence for something he couldn’t name. “There were weird mushrooms, but none of them glowed. I guess we never made it to this part of the moon. Maybe it’s just this canyon.” 

Twilight Canyon, Grif thought. No, that name was too cheesy. The Grif Twilight Canyon. There. Now it was his--now it was  _ named _ , not his. There was a difference. The base was his, and he had no idea where it was. Beautiful as this (stupid fucking) canyon was, he felt naked and exposed in it, like he’d misplaced something important. 

_ Where where where is base? Where is nest? Where where where?  _

No, Grif told himself, that was the dragon brain. Dragons must have been territorial, like cats. Weren’t they like that in stories? Hoarding and all that. Granted that hoarding was a completely understandable situation for anyone who had ever been without, as Grif could attest, but he didn’t like dragon brain taking the lead this easily. He was in control, thank you. He was spinning in circles and flapping his wings in agitation because he wanted to, that was all. It was to get the moths and fireflies away.

“No biggie, no biggie,” he said, ignoring how his heart started to race. “I’ll just call up my map on my HUD and oh right.” He smacked himself in the face with a wing. “No biggie, again! The least biggie in the history of the universe. I’ll just spend the night here, in a neat little dragon cave, and then fly home. It’s a moon, it can’t be that big. If I fly in one direction the whole time…”

Well, he hadn’t flown in one single direction to get here. He’d been zigging and zagging, letting his wings take the lead and drunk on the rush of a race that never ended. If he flew in the wrong direction, he’d just loop around Iris without getting anywhere. 

Ugh, here he was about to curl up and sleep and now he was too worked up to do it properly. He should just follow the sound of the falling water. Running water sounds always helped him sleep like a baby. Wait, falling water? 

He gingerly stepped into the cave mouth, making sure it was big enough to fit him. He had to fold his wings a little uncomfortably, but there was still room for his big, long body as long as he kept his neck low. Not only did he hear water, he smelled it. The air was damp and getting wetter, without the murky, mossy scent of the lake. 

There were aspects of being a dragon he could certainly do without (being a  _ dragon _ , for instance) but dragon nose was kind of neat. 

The lichens were thin in the cave, providing just enough light for him to see. As they dimmed he found he didn’t need them, his nose and hearing telling him all he needed. The cave was almost a straight shot through the canyon, save for that big stalactite in the middle that smashed him in the nose and earned the honorary title Fucking Bullshit Stalactite Bitch-Ass Fucker, with a gaping mouth that opened just behind a roaring waterfall. 

Oh, a waterfall! Maybe that was the one where he and Carolina had done their relaxation training. (The key was to be like the waterfall. Do waterfalls give a damn about anything? Nope.) If that was the case he wasn’t far at all. 

He shoved his neck through the waterfall, shuddering and cursing as the cold water hit his scales. He sputtered, shaking his head, and looked around. 

Well, no glowing lichens here, but he could tell from the starlight and the light of the planets alone that this was not the relaxation waterfall.

The waterfall streamed from the top of the canyon off a sheer cliff into a river flowing down through the valley. In the distance he could see mountains jutting up from a more heavily forested floor. The closest was clearly volcanic, its weathered crater covered with snow. 

“So nothing familiar there either, huh.” He sighed, pulling his head back to lap up a few drinks from the waterfall. Water would calm his stomach and hopefully his mind. He was in mid-lick when he saw the glow. 

Seeing something glowing red on a volcano was never a good sign, but it was usually an explicable one. Lava didn’t stream outwards from a crater in such even, cubic patterns, though, and it absolutely did not look like enormous circuitry. 

No, that was light, a ray of circuitry light streaming from the volcano in all directions, moving much faster than any lava would. It spilled out over the valley and across the canyon like grasping fingers. Within seconds it was crawling towards the very waterfall Grif was now using to hide from whatever that was. 

It passed over him. He saw it and  _ felt  _ it pass, hot and electrical in his bones. It hurt, it burned, and yet he found himself missing it the moment it’d left. Everything felt so cold in comparison.

“What was that?” He hated how his voice managed to squeak coming out of a creature that ought to roar. Something dripped on his head, and he looked up at the roof of the cave.

Glowing lichen were sprouting from the very walls and growing as he watched, their fungal roots digging into tiny grooves in the rock and jamming them open. Their stalks burst into the weathered holes of the cave. They were everywhere, and they were going to collapse the limestone.

There was no such thing as ‘too full to fly’ when it came to self-preservation. He darted through the waterfall and upwards above the cave as the hole behind the waterfall filled with a vivid green-blue glow. Beneath him, he could see shadows of trees twisting and changing, growing bigger and stronger or withering before his sight. A stream of the little roly poly creatures emerged from the ground in a fountain. One of them stopped, split apart, grew legs and started shedding its plates, displaying that same red glow.

He swept upwards as far as his wings would carry him, landing atop the ridge of the canyon alongside the plateau river that fed the waterfall, and stared out at the volcano again. Something very, very strange was happening to Iris. 

And Iris was  _ his. _


	5. Dragons are Fearless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bat country.

Grif stood at the edge of the plateau, watching the volcano. Between the moonlight and the sudden bloom of glowing fungi reaching its way across the valleys and canyon walls the night was lit bright as morning, like a city full of Christmas lights. Kai would like it if she were there to see it.

He would never see Kai again.

It was probably for the best. She’d be alright. She was resilient, buoyant, even. He was where she couldn’t follow him, which was the safest thing for her. 

Grif was pretty sure dragons couldn’t cry, since shedding tears as an emotional reaction seemed to be a human body thing. He didn’t want to admit how much of a relief that was. Instead he shoved the regret into the back of his mind, reminding himself that he was here, now, on a moon that was acting very strange. He’d made his choices, and maybe if he knew he’d be trapped in the body of an alien creature right when Iris was turning into Jurassic Park he might have chosen differently, but fuck it! Here he was.

And there were shadows flying silhouetted against the moon. Big ones.

“Now, hold on.” He stretched his own wings out, glancing at one of them. It was hard to tell from a distance but the shape looked at least similar. Could those really be…?

It wasn’t loneliness that urged him back up into the air towards the great dark shapes circling near the summit of the green volcano. It was curiosity, that was all. It would be nice, of course, if those were dragons, and they welcomed him into their dragonly ways for a bit, and he could speak dragon presumably because he was a dragon, and maybe dragons were a lot more chill than the military and liked to spend their time relaxing on permanent dragoncation. Maybe they didn’t even know what a fat joke was. Maybe he could teach dragons how to steal wifi from passing ships and satellites using Simmons’s password. 

“Hey, guys! Uh, ladies, folks? Just. Thought I’d drop in! Fly in, I guess.” It had been so long since Grif had to introduce himself to someone new. Well, there was those reporters, but they’d assumed they knew  _ him _ through reputation. “Is this a-like a party? A volcano party? That’s kind of a cool idea. I thought we were diurnal but, huh. Those are big horns you have,” he observed as he flew closer to the silhouettes. “Pointier than mine. They look almost like-wait, those are ears. Really big ears.” 

He heard a screech and a squeak from one of the creatures and caught a glimpse of glinting, mammalian eyes. It flashed pointed white teeth. 

“OH GOD! Oh fuck oh GOD!” Grif shrieked as the giant bats dove after him, their screeches and screams filling the air. “Go eat some fruit or someone’s soul or something you horrific flying rat hog demon spawn!” He lashed and snapped his jaws ineffectually as one of them grabbed at his wing with sharp foot claws. “Ow, fuuuck! I have no hair to nest in, leave me alone!” 

The bats were almost as big as he was and outnumbered him. He was in too much of a panic to count, but he could swear there were at least six shapes swarming him, snapping, screeching and headbutting him. Teeth tore into his wing membranes and back, claws against his scales. In desperation and panic he dove down, down out of their reach into the forest below. Were bats fast? He didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

He landed roughly in a patch of glowing fungus that shattered into squished pieces beneath him. No good; he’d still leave a visible silhouette lying in a pile of bioluminescence. There was a dark patch beneath a cluster of tall trees where Grif managed to squeeze in. He was at the foot of the mountain, facing a rock wall peppered with cave openings that might have been the remains of lava tunnels. If he could just find one that could fit him, he could hide out until morning. Bats hated morning. Like vampires.

He could hear the flaps and screeches above him, glances of claws and teeth snapping through the treetops. He scanned and sniffed around until he found an opening, long and hollow with the shine of obsidian on the walls. He scrambled in, claws struggling against the smooth, black glassy stone, finally pulling his tail up behind him and crouching at the exit. 

Something chirped in alarm. 

“Whatever you are,” he said in a low voice, “I am commandeering this tunnel in the name of the UNSC. Get out or be dessert.” 

The source of the noise skittered off. All Grif caught was a glance at a fluffy tail. Aw, it was probably cute and he’d stolen its home. Poor thing. Maybe he could make friends with it later and have a heartwarming animal companion. 

A screech shook the walls of the tunnel as a dark shape descended.

Fuck heartwarming animal companions! Everything on this moon was evil, evil and full of a desire to eat him. Why was Iris transforming into Australia? And why had this bat followed him so far?

It hovered in front of the tunnel, screeching and bearing its fangs. It was the biggest one, almost as big as he was. Its companions would soon follow, trap him here and drag him out to devour. He always knew he would die at the hands of bats.

Grif also felt he would die cursing at the top of his lungs, more on principle than anything else. He would not do anything willingly and that included dying. At least, he meant for a stream of angry obscenities to come out of his mouth. 

Instead he felt something burning hot in his throat and guts. He reflexively did something that felt like both a scream and a sneeze. Hot white light filled his vision. 

The bats scattered with a shriek and the smell of burnt fur. A tree smouldered, half its leaves burnt to a crisp and its trunk blackened. 

“...Huh. Was that me?” He puffed a little smoke ring with the experience of a former pack-a-day smoker. Whatever he’d done he couldn’t produce more than that; a second attempt to blow flames out just resulted in a coughing fit. But still, he’d breathed fire. 

“HA! Suck it, assholes! Try that again, why don’t you?!” He paused. “Wait, don’t try that again. Don’t ever get near me again, devilspawn.” 

His elation and boost of confidence slid off into weariness as the adrenaline left his system. He hurt and bled all over, though it seemed the bats hadn’t given him worse than surface wounds. He was exhausted, mind full, stomach full, heart...well, he didn’t want to think about what his heart was doing. Had never worked out well before. 

Grif knew he had to investigate the mountain further. He knew he had to be vigilant. But the cave was safe, the bats were gone, and all he wanted to do was curl up with his head on his tail and sleep.

* * *

Grif awoke from a dreamless sleep to find something fluffy sitting on his face. It was very cute and made a quick snack. 

It was much earlier than he cared to be awake, barely dawn, but for some reason his dragon body just wouldn’t go back to sleep. He crawled out of the lava tunnel onto the soft ground and stretched out to look himself over and survey the damage.

The wounds had stopped bleeding, leaving behind scratches and digs in his skin that might scar over. It wasn’t anything worse than he’d dealt with as a soldier. He shook himself. Call him a coward and a wimp, would they? See how well they’d deal with blocking bullets with their face, or taking vehicles to the stomach. Or giant bats.

They were not here, he reminded himself. Their opinions did not matter. 

The tail wasn’t healing over the way he’d hoped, the flesh tender and raised in a worrisome way. At this rate he’d need to look into antibiotics or a healing pack. There were some at the base, but they were sized for humans. That, and he had no idea where the base was.

It was only then that he noticed the wing.

One of his wings was red, the same dark red as the patch over his eye. 

Simmons wing, he found himself calling it. 

No, that was silly. Simmons wasn’t literally dark red, in the same way he wasn’t actually orange. The colors were assigned randomly during training and Grif suspected the only reason why they weren’t all literally Sarge Red was so that they could tell one another apart on the battlefield. Or maybe they were all meant to be that color, but Sarge insisted he be the reddest. It’d be like Sarge. 

Granted Grif didn’t mind the orange. It was a good, relaxing color, like a sunset or a tropical cocktail. It was the third best color of M&M, green and blue being off limits to Red Team. If people would just stop insisting on fancying it up by calling it ‘gold’ or ‘reddish-yellow’ or God forbid, ‘burnt ochre’...

Well, no one was going to call it that now. It was buried (safely, safely) in a hole. That his scales were the same color as his armor, minus the stripes, was just a weird coincidence. He probably just had discolored piebald patches where Simmons’s skin grafts would be because, well, the skin there was different, and it was Simmons Armor-Colored because who cared why, it didn’t matter! They were just colors, goddammit, and he wasn’t even on Red Team anymore.

Too fucking late. He was thinking about Simmons again. 

“Stupid moon did that on purpose,” he muttered as he dug a claw in the dirt. “I have better things to do than feel things.” 

‘Like what, asshole?’ It was so easy to reproduce Simmons’s voice in his head. ‘Hide from bats?’

“Like care about my survival! Which is very much at risk right now, thank you, and not just from the bats. Like this, uh, this.” He curled his tail around to look at the puffy wound. Yes, back to practical concerns. Practical concerns made the Simmons voice go away. And he didn’t need to die of an infection while trying to be a hero here. 

Grif’s biggest ‘practical concern’ was whatever was changing the moon at an alarming rate, and this mountain had something to do with it. He considered flying up to the summit at daylight, but what if those bat monsters liked staying awake during the day? What if he ran into giant day-bats? Besides, he felt he ought to take a few hours to recover before trying to fly again. 

His dragon-body was good at flying and swimming. Walking on the ground was a little more awkward, though he found he was starting to figure out a quick little hop-gait where he braced himself on his wings. He probably looked ridiculous, but who was there to see him? 

Dragon-body also had a hell of a nose. That was a little surprising, as Grif was pretty sure reptiles weren’t known to be great sniffers. Then again, he wasn’t a true reptile, just...reptilian. The nose wouldn’t take the place of high tech tracking equipment built into his armor, but it would have to do. All he had to do was figure out what alien technology smelled like, and dig through a million forest scents to track it. Easy. 

He picked up on dead leaves, dirt, animal droppings, none of which smelled as unpleasant as he thought it should. A sickly-sweet scent led him to a cluster of familiar-looking mushrooms growing beneath a rock. They were larger than the ones the Reds and Blues had tried before, probably due to that weird energy wave. He made a note to return there if he needed a boost of speed, say to avoid being eaten by bats.

After tracking around a forest with trees big enough to hide even his current form, eating all the big, sweet, green fruits growing off of one for what Grif liked to call ‘breakfast or whatever,’ and a very unpleasant encounter with Alien Skunk Cabbage, he finally started to pick up on something strange. He couldn’t describe the scent if he tried, not even in his own mind, but he felt like he knew it. It was drawing him irresistibly, like a promise of a sweet frozen drink and a fresh slice of pepperoni pizza. It was the scent of safety and comfort, of warm sun and a long day spent doing nothing at all. He didn’t know what it was, but he needed it. 

“So that’s what I do now, huh? Just follow my nose like the fuckin’ toucan or whatever,” he grumbled to himself as he trod along the scent trail. His back legs flattened tree saplings and his wings brushed against branches, knocking leaves about. “Sorry to anything in there,” he added as one branch came tumbling down in the wake of his wing. “Even if you’re probably gonna try to eat me because nature is a fucking…”

He trailed off, because he’d reached the source of the scent. It was strongest here, in a cleared-out area at the foot of the mountain where a small outcropping jutted over to form a shelter from the rain. Well, a shelter for something that could fit more than its head. Grif had to kneel down flat to the ground and slip his head in to find what had drawn him in. 

There was a scrap of cloth on the ground, one he had to use care to pick up with his teeth and drag out into the light. It was the heavy industrial green of UNSC tent materials, the same kind that they’d provided the survivors of Chorus as shelter during rebuilding efforts. In turn, Chorus had provided the Reds and Blues with tents, bedrolls and other survival items for Iris. So someone had been camping out here. 

This couldn’t have been the source of the scent, could it? He wouldn’t be drawn to the smell of old biodegradable plastic already starting to break down. 

Turning to the campsite he started digging, leaning on his side to squeeze his back claws in rather than bothering with his wing dewclaws. Sure enough, his feet hit something that lodged itself between his toes. He nudged it out with his nose and looked it over. 

It was some kind of marker. These were used by UNSC researchers to record data on a site, monitor it and return to it later. Often they contained encoded messages. This one, a stake with a round object at the top, was glowing and pulsing, meaning it carried a recording. 

The UNSC hadn’t been on Iris recently enough to leave this much evidence behind. As far as he knew they recorded it as an uninhabited moon and that was as far as it went. Even if they’d been doing research and left shortly before the Reds and Blues showed up, there would have been more research sites than this one encampment. 

But there had been a supply of research markers at the original base. They’d used some of them as pranks, leaving recorded messages at the mouths of caves or relaying long-running jokes that somehow never got old. Good times, Grif thought before he caught himself. 

So this was one of theirs. But who was here? And why the scent?

He picked it up in his mouth as gently as he could, withdrawing back into his lava tube shelter. It was time to test out passwords. 

With dewclaws. 

On a very small, fragile piece of equipment.

Because of course. 


End file.
